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This book presents a commentary on and an analysis of P. Leiden I 344 recto, which contains the poem variously called The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All or The Admonitions (Mahnworte), from the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt. The first part of the book comprises an analysis of several literary aspects of the poem, including its unity, compositional date, reception, possible setting, genre, literary style and meaning. It also offers a literary reading of the poem within the context of the cultural and intellectual milieu that produced it. The second part of the book provides a detailed translation, commentary to, and literary reading of, the poem, subdivided into sections that largely follow the divisions within the manuscript. A metrical transliteration is given, broadly following the prosodic principles of Gerhard Fecht, which provide a pragmatic formal mode of analysis. The degree to which these are relevant to the compositional structure of the poem is discussed.

This chapter examines the main points of the story line described in Genesis and Exodus to see if they are plausible within the limits of present knowledge of ancient Egypt. It explores what became of the Semites who entered Egypt during the First and Second Intermediate Periods. The fate of these peoples during this period is not altogether clear. Certainly there is no evidence of any organized effort to rid Egypt of these people, such as that at the end of the Hyksos period. Since many were pastoral nomads, some may have returned to the Levant, though it appears that a significant portion stayed on and assimilated into Egyptian culture. There is ample documentation during the Middle Kingdom of a significant Semitic-speaking population in Egypt. An oft-cited document that provides information on Semites in Egypt during the late Middle Kingdom is Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446.

This chapter surveys the textual and archaeological evidence for libraries in ancient Egypt c.2600–1600 BCE, discussing surviving administrative ‘archives’ as models for how literary texts could have been circulated and stored. The implications of the material form of surviving manuscripts for issues of manufacture and storage are discussed. Possible evidence for extensively centralized systems of circulation and storage is reviewed, together with specific case studies of private archives form the town of el-Lahun and examples of Middle Kingdom tomb-libraries—collections of manuscripts deposited in private individual’s burial chambers as displays of culture and prestige.

This chapter shows the picture that emerges regarding Israel's national origins in Egypt as the Bible records them. It has been shown that in nearly all periods there were Asiatics living in Egypt, especially in the First and Second Intermediate Periods. As the Middle Kingdom was breaking up, or early in the Second Intermediate Period, appears to have been the most likely time when the family of Jacob emigrated to Egypt and Joseph served as a court official. After a century of domination of Egypt by the Hyksos, it seems that repressive measures were taken against the remaining Semites in Egypt. It has also been shown that the name “Moses” is at home in the New Kingdom. Finally, important geographical questions have been answered that demonstrate that a coherent and singular route is described in Exodus and Numbers for the departure from Egypt to Sinai, despite it not being possible to plot this on a map with absolute certainty.

This chapter discusses mathematical texts that originated from the Middle Kingdom. While this may well be caused by the vagaries of preservation, it might be that it reflects the actual situation, that is, that mathematical texts of the kind that we have from the Middle Kingdom did not exist in earlier periods. With the reestablishment of central power by the king in the Middle Kingdom also came about a complete new organization of the administrative apparatus that was designed to be much less independent than it had been at the end of the Old Kingdom. And this may well have entailed the organization of teaching mathematics to the future scribes in a centrally organized style, with prescribed problems and their solutions. The chapter considers extant hieratic mathematical texts, mathematical procedure texts, and types of mathematical problems.

This chapter describes the role of mathematics in daily life in the Middle Kingdom. The dominant role of mathematics is displayed not only in a small corpus of so-called mathematical texts, but in other sources as well. Reliefs in tombs are often decorated with scenes from daily life, such as the filling of a granary and production of bread and beer. Likewise, models left in tombs show the same activities. Scribes are often integral parts of these representations, as, for example, in the model of filling a granary. The situations encountered in documents resulting from daily mathematical practice also vary. Instead of problems, instructions, and additional calculations, we are faced only with numbers, and it is up to us to recognize the mathematics behind them. The chapter discusses the distribution of rations, architectural calculations, and land measurement.

This chapter details the achievements of the Twelfth to Thirteenth dynasties. With the accession of Amenemhat I, regarded as founder of the Twelfth Dynasty, the Middle Kingdom, inaugurated by the reunification of Egypt under Montjuhotep II, was fully underway. The remaining years of the Twelfth Dynasty seem generally to have been ones of stability and development. The transition between the Twelfth Dynasty and the Thirteenth, moreover, seems to have been peaceful enough, but the contrast between the two dynasties is striking: in place of well-documented reigns of substantial lengths, there are a huge number of kings with brief tenures of the throne, and of such obscurity that the exact order of many of them is uncertain.

During the reign of Peter and his heirs, Russia had not shared much of Europe's eighteenth-century fascination with the Orient. Things would change when Catherine the Great seized the throne in a palace coup in 1762. One of her most prized acquisitions was the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea, which had many links to classical Greece, but which most often evoked the Orient. During Catherine's reign, European cartographers had begun to draw the border with Asia with greater precision. The man most responsible for shaping the attitudes of Catherinian St. Petersburg about the East was the French philosopher Voltaire, who idealized China and wrote much about the Middle Kingdom.

As an academic discipline in Russia, orientology dates back to the reign of Tsar Peter the Great at the turn of the eighteenth century. Peter's commercial and political ambitions in Asia, along with his genuine desire to learn about the world around him, led him to initiate a systematic and scientific study of the Orient among his subjects. Peter was acting on the advice of a foreigner, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, one of the leading figures of the early Enlightenment. Leibniz was infatuated with the Middle Kingdom and had long expressed an interest in China. He was also a staunch proponent of learned societies similar to the Royal Society in London. Almost a decade after Leibniz died, his dream came to reality when the Russian Academy of Sciences held its first formal session in 1725. Another country that had piqued Peter the Great's curiosity was Japan. One of the leading figures in Russian orientology was Dimitrie Cantemir, who occupied an ambiguous position between East and West.

This chapter illustrates that from the very beginning of its relations with China, Tibet positioned itself as a peer state of the Tang, not as a submissive vassal to its Chinese overlord. Fostering territorial ambition beyond their homeland, Tibetan rulers extended their influence over the Kunlun Mountain range. They established power bases in the Qinghai Plateau, threatened and defeated the oasis states in Eastern Turkistan, and challenged Tang presence in the Western Regions. The multi-polar nature of Eastern Turkistan and the Western Regions enabled Tibet to carry out its expansionist activities into this vast area. Amid fierce power struggles, Tibet replaced Tang China as the most formidable force and subjected the Middle Kingdom to military pressures in three directions—the west, the northwest, and the southwest.

This chapter examines the formation, weaknesses, and demise of two ruler-owned trade enterprises. It describes the mercantile endeavors of early Ming China and sixteenth-century Portugal. The two were radically different. The Chinese state was based on Confucian ideology, on extensive learned bureaucracy, on a worldview of being the Middle Kingdom, and on its huge geographic scale and huge population. In many eras the Chinese Empire had no ambitions with respect to overseas trade, and in others it allowed either foreign or local merchants to trade but was not involved in trade directly. Portugal was a small and young kingdom on the margins of the Iberian Peninsula. Its state capacity was limited, but its exposure to seafaring was significant due to its location on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.